Dr. Gilman's admiration of Coleridge's talents and respect for his character soon became so enthusiastic that the remainder of the poet's life was made comfortable by his care and under his roof. After the death of Coleridge the first volume of a biography was published by Dr. G., but has never been completed. We are therefore left in ignorance of the process by which his addiction to opium was reduced to the small daily allowance which he used during the later years of his life. It seems from the following letter addressed to Dr. Gilman more than six years after he was received as a member of his household, that the conflict with the habit was still going on. "I am still too much under the cloud of past misgivings—too much of the stun and stupor from the recent peals and thunder-crash still remain—to permit me to anticipate others than by wishes and prayers."
Coleridge wrote but little respecting his own infirmity. Ten years after his domestication in the family of Dr. Gilman he made the following memorandum:
"I wrote a few stanzas twenty years ago—soon after my eyes had been opened to the true nature of the habit into which I had been ignorantly deluded by the seeming magic effects of opium in the sudden removal of a supposed rheumatic affection, attended with swellings in my knees and palpitations of the heart, and pains all over me, by which I had been bedridden for nearly six months. Unhappily, among my neighbor's and landlord's books was a large parcel of medical reviews and magazines. I had always a fondness (a common case, but most mischievous turn with reading men who are at all dyspeptic) for dabbling in medical writings; and in one of these reviews I met a case which I fancied very like my own, in which a cure had been affected by the Kendal Black Drop. In an evil hour I procured it. It worked miracles. The swellings disappeared, the pains vanished; I was all alive; and all around me being as ignorant as myself, nothing could exceed my triumph. I talked of nothing else, prescribed the newly-discovered panacea for all complaints, and carried a bottle about with me, not to lose any opportunity of administering 'instant relief and speedy cure' to all complainers, stranger or friend, gentle or simple. Need I say that my own apparent convalescence was of no long continuance? But what then? the remedy was at hand and infallible. Alas! it is with a bitter smile, a laugh of gall and bitterness, that I recall this period of unsuspecting delusion, and how I first became aware of the Maelstrom, the fatal whirlpool to which I was drawing just when the current was already beyond my strength to stem. God knows that from that moment I was the victim of pain and terror, nor had I at any time taken the flattering poison as a stimulus, or for any craving after pleasurable sensation. I needed none—and oh! with what unutterable sorrow did I read the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater,' in which the writer with morbid vanity makes a boast of what was my misfortune, for he had been faithfully and with an agony of zeal warned of the gulf, and yet willfully struck into the current! Heaven be merciful to him!
"Even under the direful yoke of the necessity of daily poisoning by narcotics, it is somewhat less horrible through the knowledge that it was not from any craving for pleasurable animal excitement, but from pain, delusion, error, of the worst ignorance, medical sciolism, and (alas! too late the plea of error was removed from my eyes) from terror and utter perplexity and infirmity—sinful infirmity, indeed, but yet not a willful sinfulness—that I brought my neck under it. Oh, may the God to whom I look for mercy through Christ, show mercy on the author of the 'Confessions of an Opium-eater,' if, as I have too strong reason to believe, his book has been the occasion of seducing others into this withering vice through wantonness. From this aggravation I have, I humbly trust, been free as far as acts of my freewill and intention are concerned; even to the author of that work I pleaded with flowing tears, and with an agony of forewarning. He utterly denied it, but I fear that I had even then to deter, perhaps not to forewarn."
Referring to the character of Coleridge's disorder, Dr. Gilman says: "He had much bodily suffering. The cause of this was the organic change slowly and gradually taking place in the structure of the heart itself. But it was so masked by other sufferings, though at times creating despondency, and was so generally overpowered by the excitement of animated conversation, as to leave its real cause undiscovered." [Footnote: "My heart, or some part about it, seems breaking, as if a weight were suspended from it that stretches it. Such is the bodily feeling as far as I can express it by words."—Coleridge's letter to Morgan.]
In a volume entitled "Letters, Conversations, and Recollections of S. T. C.," written by an intimate friend, we find the following declaration from Coleridge himself:
"My conscience indeed bears me witness, that from the time I quitted Cambridge no human being was more indifferent to the pleasures of the table than myself, or less needed any stimulation to my spirits; and that, by a most unhappy quackery, after having been almost bedrid for near six months with swollen knees, and other distressing symptoms of disordered digestive functions, and through that most pernicious form of ignorance, medical half-knowledge, I was seduced into the use of narcotics, not secretly, but (such was my ignorance) openly and exultingly, as one who had discovered, and was never weary of recommending, a grand panacea, and saw not the truth till my body had contracted a habit and a necessity; and that, even to the latest, my responsibility is for cowardice and defect of fortitude, not for the least craving after gratification or pleasurable sensation of any sort, but for yielding to pain, terror, and haunting bewilderment. But this I say to man only, who knows only what has been yielded, not what has been resisted; before God I have but one voice—Mercy! mercy! woe is me.
"Pray for me, my dear friend, that I may not pass such another night as the last. While I am awake and retain my reasoning powers the pang is gnawing, but I am, except for a fitful moment or two, tranquil; it is the howling wilderness of sleep that I dread." (July 31, 1820.)
From this bodily slavery (for it was bodily) to a baneful drug he was never entirely free, though the quantity was so greatly reduced as not materially to affect his health or spirits.
A good deal that is known respecting Coleridge's opium habits is derived from the published papers of De Quincey, whose opportunities for becoming fully informed on the subject are beyond question: